Thursday, November 11, 2010

It feels like Saturday

Right down to the tinfoil hats on C-SPAN. I'm not used to being home in the middle of the week, but it is a federal holiday so here I am. And once again I'm marveling at the "facts" people can parrot without pausing at all to engage any brain cells. Why is our economy in the toilet? Because, and I paraphrase a caller from Alabama, there are billionsof Mexicans in this country, all working illegally. Which means, I guess, that Mexico itself is now a deserted wasteland, because its population had been only 100 million.

Maybe the caller suffered from innumeracy -- I've noticed quite a few people who seem baffled by large numbers once they get past the number of digits they personally possess. Million, billion, trillion. . . once a number has more than one comma in it, they can't tell the difference.